Little Creek Station – deactivating
The house on Flowerfield looked distractingly weird last night. My steps echoed through the empty bedrooms. There was once again room to park a car in the garage. The chipped marble tile in the dining room was no longer covered with brightly-colored foam flooring.
I headed over there at 10am Sunday, to let a friend in who wanted the old futon. 14 hours of numbing, back-breaking work later, it’s all empty. The last piece of Lego, the last click-base figure, the last six-sided die all found temporary homes in corrugated cardboard.
Last night I was too desperately tired to feel anything. This morning, I’m not sure what I feel.
At least I’m done battling the oil heater.
ReindeerFlotilla
Around 2 weeks ago, something bad happened to the password storage on my 667 MHz PowerBook, and I couldn’t even log into my own account. I tried various Mac/Unix fixes for this that I found Googling, but it was a wash. (One of them claimed that a second admin account would have made it easy. raininva made sure to tease me about that, since her account is a simple user.)
Luckily, any FireWire-equipped Mac can be made to pretend it’s nothing more than an expensive external drive, and all files were easily backed up to the desktop Mac. Last week, I found time to wipe and re-install, and this morning I got around to running Software update for all the OS patches. (Busy much? You don’t know the half of it.) Hopefully, I’ll find the time soon to copy all my documents back over and re-install any vital apps. (Nice thing about a wipe – you get rid of a lot of apps you weren’t really using.)
Interestingly enough, and saving me a lot of download time to boot, the wired Ethernet port on the machine has suddenly started working again. I had suspected software issues, not hardware ones, when it failed a few months ago.
The house is freezing. We switched to electric space heaters from the hot water radiators, since the oil costs for the latter were killing our bank account. Electric heat is much cheaper, but very very localized – especially when it hit 31 Farenheit outdoors the night before.
“I yam a jalapeno onna steeek.”
raininva and I went to the Virginia Beach Funny Bone to see Jeff Dunham tonight. Lots of you might have caught part of his act, because he’s been doing it for a while – I swear I saw him on “Solid Gold” once. I haven’t laughed that hard since the first time I saw Eddie Izzard do his act. The tickets were pricier than usual, so it’s good to leave feeling like we got our money’s worth.
Our oil heater, once again, isn’t working right. In what I think is an intentional snub, it’s getting air in the line and failing every time the weather gets cold out. I woke up this morning to a 50-degree house. On the bright side, I got a couple points to spend in “Driver’s Seat Replacement” today and made the skill check just fine. Rain’s Pontiac should be much more comfortable to drive, now.
A few weeks ago, I bought the first book of Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy, thinking if the first one was any good, I’d buy the rest. It seems Pullman knew I would do this, because the first book isn’t a bad start at all, but the second two fall apart almost immediately. The books are being marketed to the Harry Potter crowd, but while Rowling does a fair job of writing about adult themes from an adolescent’s viewpoint, Pullman tries to stuff in philosophical observations of the nature of good and evil, the way that people’s souls change over time, and a literal war to destroy Heaven. Throw in a large cast of characters we’re given no reason to care about, and I’m reminded of Steve Martin’s line: “I’ve written a number of children’s books. Not on purpose.”
Gregory Maguire’s “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West” is a slightly better read, but only if you are willing to assume that everything you saw in the movie (I haven’t read the original books) was a propagandist’s lie. At this point in my reading, the WWW isn’t any more evil than your average misunderstood goth chick, while the Wizard is a fascist dictator bringing all the worst kinds of “progress” to Oz. If the writing wasn’t pretty decent, I think I might have moved on from this one by now… and I can’t imagine this being the Broadway musical that’s it’s been adapted into.
It’ll take a while to load, but you should watch this Flash animation. Any non-geeks on my friends list (are there any?) may understand the rest of us a little better 🙂
Speaking of web video… Rube Goldberg meets Half-Life 2 in the “Doctor Breen Butt-Kicking Machine“.
Oh, and over the course of Thursday and Friday, I put 22 hours in at work. Yeek.
Water, fire, and radiation
Monday morning, our oil heater (which handles water and house heating) conked out on us. We had a cold Monday and Tuesday, and a shower with 40-degree water’s not much fun at all.
After discovering that a repair call would cost around $350, we decided to get out the tools and see if we could break anything else get it working again. Last night around 9, we re-discovered fire, and I can add a die or two of “oil heater repair” to the skill list on my character sheet. Hot water is so wonderful when you’ve gone without for 36 hours or so.
My parking garage has switched from magnetic-stripe access cards to RFID cards. I no longer swipe the card through a reader, I just wave the card in the reader’s general direction. Makes me feel like a VIP with a special pass or something.
